When Will the Dead Lady Sing? (25 page)

The light rain was still falling. She gave me a reproachful look to say “It’s all your fault,” and squatted quickly on the soaked grass, then dashed back in and shook herself all over me.

I hopped to the front door and propped on the walker, glumly regarding the paper. It lay in the grass only twenty-five feet away, but it might as well have been a mile. I couldn’t hop down our front steps. Even if I could, I couldn’t hop that far across even short grass, and with all the rain we’d been having, ours was a foot high.

“Can you fetch?” I asked Lulu, who had come in with me. “See the paper? Go get it, girl.”

She gave me a look that said “If you think I am going back out in that rain, you can think again.” Then she did her three-legged hop to her breakfast dish to show me that people who lost the use of a leg didn’t
have
to be helpless.

“Ungrateful wretch,” I muttered.

I looked up and down the sidewalk. At barely past five, the street was completely deserted.

I considered the problem while I started coffee. I couldn’t bear for Joe Riddley to open that paper before me. Could I reach it if I went down to the sidewalk in my wheelchair, then hopped on the grass just a few feet? I hopped through the kitchen and into the garage, got into the wheelchair, pushed the button to raise the door, and headed down the drive.

I knew it was a mistake as soon as I felt the mist on my head and shoulders. To make things worse, the driveway was a slight incline, and slick. Next thing I knew, I was whizzing toward the street, picking up speed as I went.

Maybe some people see their lives flash before them in times of danger. All I could see was myself sprawled in the street in my nightgown. I found the brakes about the time I bumped across the sidewalk. By the time I’d jerked them both up against the wheels, I was rolling smack into the lights of an approaching car.

The wheelchair swerved on a slick spot. The car lights blinded me. I heard the squeal of tires and flung up my arms to cover my head before the crash.

A white Mercedes stopped five feet from my left wheel.

Trembling so hard I could not move, I sat there feeling stupid, helpless, and very wet.

Georgia Bullock jumped out. She wore a pale silver raincoat to match the car. “Mackie?” She clung to the top of her door. “I thought I’d killed you! What on earth were you doing?” Her face was chalky in the dim light.

I spoke through chattering teeth. “Coming to get the paper. I lost control on the hill.” I wrapped my arms around my chest to keep myself from shaking apart.

“Hill?”

I followed her gaze up the drive. The grade was very slight from one end to the other. I tried to laugh, but it wasn’t one of my better efforts. “It felt like a mountain, coming down. Better than a roller coaster.”

“Whew!” She let out her breath, and I saw she was trembling, too. “Abigail wanted to bring you a note, but she’s so exhausted, I told her to sleep, I’d bring it. We were both lucky I was driving slow, looking for the number.” She shut the car door behind her, took an envelope from her pocket, then stuffed it back again. Her hands were shaking too hard to grip it. “I never imagined I’d find you up this early—much less run you down.”

“You’re up early, too,” I pointed out.

“We never went to bed.” As she came closer, I saw dark circles under her eyes. “We’ve been trying to decide what to do. I don’t know if you heard—”

“I saw you on the news. I’m so sorry, honey. If you’ll push me up the hill, I’ve got coffee made, and Joe Riddley won’t be stirring for an hour or more.”

“Coffee would be heaven.” She wheeled me into the garage and would have gone in the side door, but I waved her to stop. “I have to use the walker from here on.” I hopped ahead of her into the kitchen. She shed her raincoat as she came in. Under it, she was still wearing the navy pants and white blouse she’d had on the night before, but without the jacket and scarf. Fine lines of weariness fanned out around her eyes. When she reached a dining room chair, she collapsed onto it with a grateful sigh.

The walker had a tray, so I carried in two coffee mugs, spoons, and a pint of half-and-half. We’d moved the coffeemaker to the dining room table since my accident, so I didn’t have to get up to refill my cup, and sugar and napkins were also on the table. Thank goodness, because Georgia sat at the table as if she didn’t notice a thing I was doing, and my leg would never have survived another trip. I sank into a chair around the corner from her. “Drink up.” I wished I could go put on something dry, but hopping even the short distance to our room was impossible.

“Thanks.” Georgia filled a mug and held it to her cheek, looking desperate for warmth. “This is so awful! I don’t know what we’re going to do. All these years, we’ve thought Sperra was dead. Now, to find her here, living like that—” Was she conscious that she was echoing Lance, or was that part of a prepared speech they had come up with?

I had no idea what it was like to live in a family where every word you uttered could be taken down and published across the country, where every outfit you wore was cri tiqued by the fashion conscious, where you had to watch yourself every second in case some private emotion made its way onto a television screen. I thought of Renée as I had seen her in a few unguarded moments and knew she had better develop a thicker skin and actor’s skills before her husband faced election day.

Georgia dumped three spoonfuls of sugar into her mug, followed it with a hefty dollop of cream, then gulped the coffee as if she needed the sweet warm brew to survive.

“Why wasn’t Sperra dead?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, why did you think she was?”

She sighed. “That was my fault—mine and Abigail’s.” She leaned across the corner of the table, maybe worried that Joe Riddley might show up and hear.

“Sperra never lived with Burlin after the trial. She was sentenced to a rehab prison that kept her only two years. After that, they let her out, saying she was cured. That was a joke. A week later she turned up on Burlin’s back porch drunk and unconscious. Lance, who wasn’t quite seven, found her and ran screaming into the house that his mommy was dead. It gave him nightmares for weeks.”

“Poor baby!”

“You can’t imagine. Abigail and I both begged Burlin to divorce Sperra and get a court order forbidding her to come to the house, but he convinced us that a divorce would mean more publicity, and Sperra had a nasty streak when she was drinking. None of us knew what she might do or say in court. So he opened her a bank account and told her he’d put money in it every month, but he’d close it if she ever came back to the house again. She stormed out and showed up a few weeks later out in Spokane, where she had a college roommate. We told people she had moved to Paris—she’d been a French major in college—and Burlin made arrangements with the roommate to pay her bills. For the next seven years, Sperra bounced between sobriety, drinking binges, and rehab centers. In the rare times she was sober, her roommate looked after her. Abigail kept begging Burlin to get a divorce because she was terrified Sperra would come back and kidnap Lance, but Burlin said he had no plans to remarry and he didn’t want the publicity. Then the roommate out in Spokane called and said Sperra had disappeared. We had a miserable year wondering every day if she’d show up again on his back porch. Can you imagine how awful that was?”

“No, I can’t.”

Georgia was talking more to herself than to me by then. I got the feeling she had been needing somebody she could tell this story to for a very long time. “Then Abigail got a call. It was for Burlin, actually, at his office, but he’d taken Lance skiing in Switzerland for his sixteenth birthday. The caller ran a homeless shelter in Atlanta, and said that during a routine drug search of his residents, he’d found a gold locket engraved ‘With Love, Burlin,’ and some identification cards for Sperra Bullock in a woman’s backpack. The woman wouldn’t say where she’d gotten them, but he’d recognized the name and thought Burlin ought to know.”

She paused to heat her coffee from the pot and take a swallow. I reached for the pot and refilled my own cup. “Abigail and I were both terrified it was Sperra. Abigail was dithering about whether to go see or to call Burlin, but I told her we should just go—although I had no idea what we’d do if it was. When we got there, though, it wasn’t her. We explained to the woman that Sperra was our sister-in-law and gave her the story we’d concocted on our way down—that Sperra was living in Paris, had come home for a visit, and been mugged. We said her purse and all her jewelry had been taken. The woman insisted she ‘hadn’t mugged nobody.’ ” Georgia’s voice took on the cadence of country Georgia. “She said that she’d gotten the things in New Orleans during a fire. She’d been in the bathroom of a homeless shelter in the middle of the night when the alarm went off, and she’d snatched up the backpack and run out the back door. She claimed she was ‘real glad to give us the things, but she could use a little something to reward her for finding the locket.’ I wouldn’t have given her anything, but Abigail gave her twenty dollars.”

Georgia bit her lower lip and exhaled years of frustration and anger. “I got on the phone to the New Orleans police, and asked about the fire. They had to check, but eventually called back to say it had happened over a year before, and they gave me the name of the woman who ran that shelter. She said the fire started in a women’s dormitory, and while they were able to save most of the building, all the women sleeping in that one room had died of smoke inhalation and their bodies were long buried. When I asked about Sperra, she confirmed Sperra had slept in that room. She uses the nickname Birdie.”

“Birdie,” I murmured, “not Bertie.” I reckoned it was the man’s suit that had made Tad and Hector hear her wrong.

Again, Georgia didn’t seem to hear me. “Can you imagine how it felt to know a member of your family had been living in a homeless shelter? We couldn’t let the papers get hold of that. And we didn’t want to exhume thirty bodies to make sure one was hers. We were certain enough to plan a small memorial service and to put up a memorial stone in the family plot in Oakland City Cemetery. All the way home from her service, I whispered, ‘Thank you, God. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.’ As far as we were concerned, years of fear and worry were over.” She set down her empty mug as if it had become too heavy to hold. “They have been, until now.”

“But if one woman was in the bathroom, Sperra could have been, too.” I was thinking out loud, trying to work it out. “She probably was, in fact, if her backpack was there to snatch. From what I understand, theft is common among homeless people, so they keep their belongings close by, wherever they go.”

“You are amazing!” Georgia told me. “Abigail
said
you do a little detecting. Her note asks if you’ll help us. I think it’s an imposition for us to ask, but if somebody doesn’t find out pretty soon who killed Sperra, Lance can kiss this election good-bye.”

I was tempted to say I’d help, but I know my limits. Right then they included a cast, Joe Riddley, and a serious lack of knowledge. “You need a professional. I don’t know a thing about this. The murders I’ve helped to solve have all been local, except one, and that one was literally dumped in my lap.”
⁴

“Here.” She cupped her hands around air and held them out toward me with a trace of the old twinkle in her eyes. Then she said, “No, I’m just kidding.”

I sighed. “I’d help if I could, but I didn’t know Sperra, and don’t have any idea who could have killed her—or how to set about finding out.”

She sipped her coffee again and looked out the window into the rain. “We’ve talked about nothing else all night, as you can well imagine, and I’m inclined to believe it must have been Hubert. Chief Muggins said he’d been threatening her because she’d been living in his barn. Can you imagine that? Living in a barn?” She wrinkled her nose, then went on without giving me a chance to reply. “For the life of me, I can’t think of any other reason for Hubert to ask me to walk down by the tracks that night. Frankly, it made me a little nervous, it was so deserted down there. But it was still light, and people were not far away.”

“You were scared of Hubert?” I was astonished, and didn’t mind if she knew it.

She laughed. “Heavens, no. But I was scared somebody might bother us, and Hubert had told us he’d had a heart attack. He wouldn’t be much protection.”

She lifted her mug and set it down immediately. I knew the coffee had to be stone cold, so I hopped to the sink, dumped it, then brought the mug back. “I don’t believe it was Hubert. I’ve known him all my life.”

She gave me a grateful smile, but her gray eyes grew serious again as she refilled her mug. “Then why did he insist on our going to the water tank? He told me he had climbed up there back in high school to paint somebody’s name on it, and he wanted to show me how he’d done it. But what if he wanted to go and leave evidence he’d been there, so if he dropped something later when he went back to kill Sperra, I could testify that he’d been there earlier? Edward said last night that anybody who commits a murder leaves some evidence at the scene. What if Hubert was planning it ahead of time?”

“Hubert’s not that devious.” But I couldn’t help remembering that he’d managed to paint my name on that tank nearly fifty years ago and I’d never known it until this week. “He told me you wanted to go to the tracks,” I remembered.

She’d been about to sip her coffee. She set it down, puzzled. “What on earth for? I hate trains. You can ask anybody who knows me. Agnes Scott is near the tracks, and the trains nearly drove me batty. Everybody else got used to them, but I never did. And I can’t conceive of any reason why I’d want to see a water tank, can you?” She sighed. “But maybe Hubert did just want to show it to me. I said I wanted a walk—I needed exercise. We’ve been eating too much and sitting too long on this trip. But we walked too far. I barely had time to shower and change before the meeting.” She got up and paced back and forth several times, then went to the front window and stared out through the blinds, like the rain might provide some answers. She asked, without turning around, “If Hubert didn’t kill Sperra, who did?”